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Service plans to reduce complexity, improve training for DCGS-A
satellites reside,” added Hitchens, who
previously directed the United Nations
Institute for Disarmament Research in
Geneva.
Referring to additional funding for
counterspace development, Hyton cited
the need for more resilient next-gener-
ation satellites with defensive capabili-
ties integrated into their designs. That
translates primarily into satellites that
could maneuver to avoid attack.
Meanwhile, Moscow has also taken a
harder line on space cooperation since
the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine.
Hitchens said those tensions “have
translated up the chain to the White
House. As a result, we’ve been hearing
more aggressive rhetoric out of the U.S.
space community regarding ‘deterrence’
and response.”
The Air Force has said little about
what new ASAT capabilities it is devel-
oping. Based on the fear of creating new
debris fields in space—space junk that
could knock out critical infrastructure
on Earth—analysts think laser technol-
ogies that could blind but not destroy
satellites are a likely focus of Air Force
development.
Then there is the larger question of
deterring China and Russia, each of
which understands the United States
has an ASAT capability. “The question is
whether a harder line approach will deter
Russia and China or push them into even
more troubling developments, and begin
an ASAT race,” Hitchens said, adding
that such a competition “would increase
risks to all space users.” n
BY KEVIN MCCANEY
The Army’s evolving global in-
telligence systems has come in
for a lot of criticism in the last
couple of years, with users complaining
it is difficult to use and unreliable. Army
leaders have taken those criticisms to
heart, however, and are promising that
future versions will be much more user-
friendly.
The Distributed Common Ground
System - Army, or DCGS-A, is used to
collect, analyze and disseminate intelli-
gence to soldiers around the world. But
since it was first approved for deploy-
ment in December 2012, the system has
suffered from glitches and resistance
from users.
At a hearing this week before the Sen-
ate Armed Services Committee’s sub-
committee on Airland, a top Army lead-
er admitted the difficulties soldiers have
had with the system and said the service
is working to correct the problem.
“We have acknowledged that the
complexity associated with the button-
ology ... has been difficult,” Lt. Gen.
Michael E. Williamson, military deputy
to the assistant secretary of the Army
for acquisition, logistics and technol-
ogy, told lawmakers. “So we have tried
to invest a lot of time, and we have also
engaged with over 150 vendors through
a series of industry days, to find out how
we can improve the existing system.”
DCGS-A is a complex system, draw-
ing information from more than 600
sources, including GPS satellites, sur-
veillance drones, ground and biometric
sensors and other systems. It combines
a number of commercial and military
software tools as well including Google
Earth and Query Tree. The combination
of so much disparate software resulted,
perhaps inevitably, in some usability
problems.
“Buttonology” was one of the terms
used in a memo from late 2013 in which
members of five units in Afghanistan
were cited as saying DCGS-A was “un-
stable, slow, not friendly and a major
hindrance to operations,” with up-
grades that wipe out users’ data. Several
also said that, while they could see the
system’s potential value, they had not
received enough training to manage its
complexity. As a result, they often opted
to use commercial tools instead. Last
summer, the Army scrapped DCGS-A
from a major exercise because of soft-
ware glitches.
Since then, the Army has been work-
ing to smooth out the system’s rough
edges and improve training. To go with
the industry days Williamson men-
tioned, the service has issued a series of
solicitations seeking input on the next
iteration, DCGS-A Increment 2, for
which the Army is planning to hold a
competition in 2016. It also is forming
tactical engagement teams of subject
matter experts to train users in making
the most of the system.
Meanwhile, work on the current
increment has improved its usability,
which the Army plans to demonstrate
during evaluations scheduled for May,
Williamson said. “I think you will see a
completely different perception of how
that tool is provided,” he said. n
Army making its intelligence system
more user-friendly
DefenseSystems.com | MAY/JUNE 2015 21
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